Sheetal & Sush
Credit: Alison Dunn Photography
Your Values and personal happiness
Sheetal and Sush have been married for nearly two years. Prior to their marriage, they dated long-distance with Sush in the New York area and Sheetal in Minneapolis.
More recently, I caught up with Sheetal on her post-MBA life and moving into a new city, San Francisco.
Sheetal just joined Abbott, a health care company, as a product manager. She describes her academic and career path as “linear.”
My path makes sense…no pivots, not a lot of trying new things.
Sheetal isn’t blindly following this route thought. She recently graduated from Booth, building her business foundation to better serve and work in the health care field. At Penn, she studied Chemical Engineering and eventually worked in health care consulting and later at Medtronic. She discovered early on that she wanted to something with social impact as her father demonstrated in working in the energy sector. He focuses on providing energy to power 7 billion people’s lives while mitigating the climate changes.
In taking on after her father, Sheetal interned in a lab working on renewal energy, but found that her “work was too far removed from the eventual impact on the planet.”
I asked her if her current role allows for her to be “closer” to the impact. She agrees that in small ways it does but that she still feels that the largeness of the company and the sheer number of people involved to bring an impactful health product to market dilutes her proximity to the ultimate impact.
Sheetal attempts to balance the “largeness” of her company with finding small non-profits to work with and have more “grassroots” impact.
While her professional life is important in defining success and happiness, Sheetal “wants it all.” She cares about developing her relationships with friends, family, and Sush as well as helping the world and feeling productive.
Sheetal defines success as “living a life that’s true to your values” and “achieving your potential.” She sees values as the constant in your life that you believe in and achieving your potential as constantly challenging yourself.
From her definition, she needs to know a person to believe whether they are successful. She refers to her last manager as a clear image of success: a leader with integrity who demonstrated that he cared about his people
Sheetal’s own values are two folds: being kind to others (as her dad raised her to be) and working hard (growing up in an immigrant family).
Being accepted into Booth demonstrated her strongest values and her best self: she worked hard and persevered to get to Booth and it paid off dividends in her personal and professional life.
In her personal life, Sheetal has found much happiness and balance in her marriage. While Sush and Sheetal have gone through long distance for some years, she could not imagine needing to go through that again as their lives are so much more intertwined and they are much happier for it. This positive effect then cascades to their professional lives and they know they’ll always be able to find opportunities in cities that both can benefit from.